JOSHUA ABEGGLEN / PERSONAL ENGINEERING LOG

I build, automate and occasionally over-engineer things.

Home infrastructure, networks, automation and experiments that seemed like a reasonable idea at the time.

Explore the projects What’s on the bench ↓

~/joshbox/now

01Networkingsegmentation / Wi-Fi / identity

02InfrastructureProxmox / Linux / storage

03Home automationHome Assistant / Zigbee / WLED

04AI operationsobserve / constrain / verify

NETWORKING ◆ INFRASTRUCTURE ◆ HOME ASSISTANT ◆ AUTOMATION ◆ SECURITY ◆ AI ◆ BUILDS

Now / active queue

Currently building.

Live projects, unfinished edges included. Status means more here than pretending everything is a polished case study.

building Home-Ops: treating my house like a tiny production environment Homelab / 01 building Can I safely let AI operate my house? AI / 02 rebuilding Directional staircase lighting Home Assistant / 03 building Smart plant cabinet Builds / 04 planned Garage door automation, with boring safety first Automation / 05 building Moving Zigbee coordination onto the network Home Assistant / 06

Featured builds

The bigger rabbit holes.

All projects ↗

01 building

Home-Ops: treating my house like a tiny production environment

A growing operational layer for the homelab: versioned configuration, recoverable change, monitoring and documentation that survives my memory.

Open project

02 building

Can I safely let AI operate my house?

A staged experiment in giving an AI-assisted operations environment useful visibility—and eventually narrow control—without pretending autonomy is magic.

Open project

03 rebuilding

Directional staircase lighting

Reworking unreliable motion lighting as a directional, addressable LED system with clear state and graceful fallback behaviour.

Open project

04 running

Building an enterprise-ish home network without making it unusable

Segmentation, resilient Wi-Fi and proper identity experiments—balanced against the fact that ordinary people still need the television to work.

Open project

System map / Home-Ops

A house, operated like a small platform.

Enough operational discipline to make change safer. Not enough to require a weekly change board.

01 Home infrastructure

02 Observe

03 Operations VM

04 Versioned change

05 Verify & recover

FEATURED PROJECTRead the Home-Ops build log

Lab notes

Smaller things worth remembering.

All lab notes ↗

31 Aug

Moving Zigbee coordination onto the network Rolling out a PoE-connected Zigbee coordinator to improve placement, resilience and the separation between radio coverage and compute.

31 Aug

Making Home Assistant failures visible Monitoring unavailable devices, stale state, low batteries and automation behaviour so “smart” systems fail loudly enough to fix.

31 Aug

Small automations that quietly earn their keep A rolling collection of lighting, heating, energy, reminders and environmental automations that are too small for grand architecture diagrams.

Professional engineering

Interesting work doesn’t only happen in the lab.

Selected, anonymised perspectives from network, infrastructure, service and consultancy work. No client names, sensitive systems or claims of solo delivery.

Need help with a real project? joshfixes.it ↗

Professional Designing network transformation without losing the service Professional Making an IT operating model work after the slide deck

By day: technology leadership, operations and strategy.

After hours: servers, sensors and finding out why the light thinks it’s on.

More about Joshua ↗